"This collection is an entrance into that part of "America" without which there is no real America and not even a real United States. It is a bravura collection, a long needed Anthology of those antediluvian descendants of the Western Hemisphere."

Amiri Baraka

“Sing: Indigenous Poetry of the Americas” showcases writing of American Indian poets from the North to South in the Western Hemisphere, giving us readers a rare and direct connection into the complexity of their lives and thinking today.

—Carla Blank, co-editor, “PowWow: Charting the Fault Lines in the American Experience—Short Fiction from Then to Now”

“Many of the poems in this ambitious collection remind us why we read poetry at all—to be returned to the elemental, to relish the beauty of repetition and variation, and to hear the cries of singular voices, here marginalized because of their native culture but also because of the daring announcement of their individuality”

—Billy Collins

Sometimes, an anthology will remind us of just how much the poet as editor can bring to the conception and execution of a work, turning it from a mere compilation of random poems, to a wonderfully conceived and eloquently expressed grand poem of multiple voices, that is marked by all the qualities we want in the best poems: passion, risk, daring, grace, imagination, urgency, compassion, visionary power, and profound homage to the grounding of tradition. In what can only be called a historical anthology of indigenous poets from the Americas, Allison Hedge Coke has given us, in Sing: Poetry from the Indigenous Americas, a stunning gift that is splendid because of the brilliance of the individual and eclectic poems collected, but richer for the coherent collective song that the anthology represents. This is a big fat book of endless pleasures that helps us to re-imagine America!

Sing celebrates the life and breadth of Indigenous American poetry. This long-awaited anthology is a beautiful and necessary treasure.

—Camille T. Dungy, editor of Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry and author of Smith Blue

I will sing this book to my children. I will give this book to my cadre, the ones that dreamt it in the sixties when they journeyed thousands of miles in search of it. And I will pour it over my face – to behold its Victory Dance and “ghost roads awakened,” its salmon climb and “hugging duendes,” its songs of dignity and its split moons sewn back into one – each voice tasking the cosmos, dissolving borders and smoothing all beings from the blood and breathe to the ink-song. Here, Hedge-Coke calls us to the new cycle of Américas indigenous poetry. A monumental triumph.

One of the most essential anthologies of recent years, Sing is rare in scope and insight. The poems found here are a testament to the power of indigenaity and the urgency of our current moment. This book sings the hemisphere into glorious fullness, teaching us the connections between us, and the great schisms between our knowledge and our actions.

Matthew Shenoda, author of Seasons of Lotus, Seasons of Bone

What a diverse feast of poetry! Indigenous poets from Peru, Venezuela, Columbia, Ecuador, Guatemala, Mexico and Canada as well as the United States serve up delicious unforgettable poems. A good number of the poems are composed in indigenous languages which make this collection especially valuable.

—Leslie Marmon Silko

Allison Hedge Coke has assembled a multilingual feast of songs, bringing together established and emerging indigenous poets in South, Central, and North America. With poems presented in their original languages, this anthology is a groundbreaking collection.

—Arthur Sze, author, The Ginkgo Light

Panoramic, wise, palpable texts of beauty and vitality. This is what the world needs to wake itself up to its own better self and imagination.

Anne Waldman

The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied PoeticsNaropa University

Editor and poet Allison Hedge Coke assembles this multilingual collection of Indigenous American poetry, joining voices old and new in songs of witness and reclamation. Unprecedented in scope, Sing gathers more than eighty poets from across the Americas, covering territory that stretches from Alaska to Chile, and features familiar names like Sherwin Bitsui, Louise Erdrich, Joy Harjo, Lee Maracle, and Simon Ortiz alongside international poets—both emerging and acclaimed—from regions underrepresented in anthologies.

They write from disparate zones and parallel experience, from lands of mounded earthwork long-since paved, from lands of ancient ball courts and the first great cities on the continents, from places of cold, from places of volcanic loam, from zones of erased history and ongoing armed conflict, where “postcolonial” is not an academic concept but a lived reality. As befits a volume of such geographical inclusivity, many poems here appear in multiple languages, translated by fellow poets and writers like Juan Felipe Herrera and Cristina Eisenberg.

Hedge Coke’s thematic organization of the poems gives them an added resonance and continuity, and readers will appreciate the story of the genesis of this project related in Hedge Coke’s deeply felt introduction, which details her experiences as an invited performer at several international poetry festivals. Sing is a journey compelled by the exploration of kinship and the desire for songs that open “pathways of return.”

Off-Season City PipeDrawing on her background as a tobacco sharecropper, factory worker, and fisherwoman, Hedge Coke fills the void of Native American working-class literature with poems as vivid in their telling as they are powerful in their ethos. Off-Season City Pipe lyrically articulates the stark contrast between an ancestry whose strong work ethic, manual skills, and environmental stewardship defined their communities, but whose present circumstances have forced so many into poverty, performing work that fails to provide sustenance for the land or its people.

Listed on Poetry Foundation Bestsellers, in the U.S., from time to time.

Dog Road Woman"Allison Hedge Coke is a skilled, spirited, young poet who is transforming and honing her social and personal experience and reflection to speak with the voice of a whole people. This is a very formidable task, but it is, finally, the work we’ve chosen. She’s up to it." - Amiri Baraka

In Dog Road Woman, an autobiographical sketch of a contemporary mixed-blood native life, Allison Adelle Hedge Coke weaves the shapes and patterns of her heritage into a magnificent tapestry of prayer, story and song. Dog Road Woman is winner of a 1998 American Book Award and a finalist for the 1998 Patterson Poetry Prize.

WC Writer of the Year Award Winning Labor Poetry from Coffee House Press [poetry]
Drawing on her background as a tobacco sharecropper, factory worker, and fisherwoman, Hedge Coke fills the void of Native American working-class literature with poems as vivid in their telling as they are powerful in their ethos. Off-Season City Pipe lyrically articulates the stark contrast between an ancestry whose strong work ethic, manual skills, and environmental stewardship defined their communities, but whose present circumstances have forced so many into poverty, performing work that fails to provide sustenance for the land or its people.

"Allison Hedge Coke is a skilled, spirited, young poet who is transforming and honing her social and personal experience and reflection to speak with the voice of a whole people. This is a very formidable task, but it is, finally, the work we’ve chosen. She’s up to it." - Amiri Baraka

In Dog Road Woman, an autobiographical sketch of a contemporary mixed-blood native life, Allison Adelle Hedge Coke weaves the shapes and patterns of her heritage into a magnificent tapestry of prayer, story and song. Dog Road Woman is winner of a 1998 American Book Award and a finalist for the 1998 Patterson Poetry Prize.

Hedge Coke recounts surviving domestic violence, racism, addiction, and an extraordinary number of challenges. By drawing upon a variety of poetic and prosaic forms, she simulates and transforms the rhythms and sounds of her people. Dog Road Woman is a sublime presentation of the strength, beauty, and spirit of the nations.

It is a rare pleasure to unleash beauty upon the ever-tragic world, an exception to the plagued misfortune of greed, despair, and injury. Though elements of colonization do present certain challenges and malady to a natural world inhabited for tens of thousands of years by peoples steeped in ideologies, practical and philosophic systems, they do not overcome the lingual sensibilities and prowess of the poets representing the areas of the planet present in this text. Instead the poets overcome the intrusion.

From ulu, to cane knife, where aurora’s green vein bleeds blue and tangles into indigo or green-robed mauna combs t? stalks, palms, kukui, and pines. From Barrow to Waihe’e, tethered and hammered through wild among dark branches and snared by voices, these poems harbor whale and seal oil burning to bring sustenance to a reader’s search for light and with them carry us into a seafaring world of rich embrace. Spectacular, immediate, these beaches and beeches along the shores provide a tactile relationship made immense in their stream-crafted images.

Effigies juxtaposes the distinctive voices and visions of four emerging poets — dg nanouk okpik, Cathy Rexford, Brandy Nalani McDougall, and Mahealani Perez-Wendt. In drawing from their Native Alaskan and Native Hawaiian cultures and histories, the poems in this book are not an assemblage but a living force and create an intricate, haunting weave.
Arthur Sze

What a shape-shifting moment, this release of four lush and necessary voices into the open air. Linked by blood and fevered lyric, dg nanouk okpik, Cathy Tagnak Rexford, Brandy Nalani McDougall and Mahealani Perez-Wendt offer up unapologetic and unflinching lessons that, as okpik says in the astonishing "Corpse Whale," shove "sinew back into the threaded bones of the land." Individually, each of these voices would be a revelation. Collectively, they're a revolution.
Patricia Smith

Allison Adelle Hedge Coke was born between paternal oratory and sudden maternal madness; somewhere north of the condor and south of raven. Crow sometimes cawed morning into malady's mixture, pouring song and hack into bleating skies, swirling sunrise and set. Once, high over the Arctic, she witnessed the pounding lights hammer horizon. Since that time her rendezvous with realtime has been a real ride.

Hedge Coke is a MacDowell, Black Earth Institute Think-Tank, Hawthornden Castle, Weymouth Center, and Center for Great Plains Research Fellow, and holds the Distinguished Paul W. Reynolds and Clarice Kingston Reynolds Endowed Chair in English as an Associate Professor of Poetry and Writing at the University of Nebraska, Kearney. She is a core faculty in the University of Nebraska MFA Program and Visiting Faulty of the MFA Intensive Programs at University of California, Palm Desert and Naropa University. Her books include: Dog Road Woman, American Book Award, Coffee House Press, 1997; The Year of the Rat, chapbook, Grimes Press, 2000; Rock, Ghost, Willow, Deer, AIROS Book-of-the-Month, University of Nebraska Press, 2004; Off-Season City Pipe, Wordcraft Writer of the Year for Poetry, Coffee House Press, 2005; Blood Run, Wordcraft Writer of the Year for Poetry, Salt Publications, UK 2006-US 2007; and To Topos Ahani, Oregon State University, 2007.

Allison Hedge Coke has been an invitational performer in international poetry festivals in Medellin, Colombia, Venezuela, Argentina, Canada, and Jordan and foreign visiting professional in poetry and writing, Shandong University in Wei Hai, China. She is a Weymouth Center for the Arts and Humanities, MacDowell Colony for Artists, Black Earth Institute Think Tank, Hawthornden Castle, and Center for Great Plains Research Fellow, is a former National Endowment for the Humanities Appointment Distinguished Visiting Professor at Hartwick College, and holds the Distinguished Paul W. Reynolds and Clarice Kingston Reynolds Endowed Chair in Poetry as an Associate Professor of Poetry and Writing at the University of Nebraska, Kearney where she directs the Reynolds Reading Series and Sandhill Crane Migration Retreat. She is core faculty in the University of Nebraska MFA Program and Visiting Faulty of the MFA Intensive Programs at University of California, Palm Desert and Naropa University, and a 2008 Paul Hanly Furfey Endowed Lecturer. Her books include: Dog Road Woman, American Book Award, Coffee House Press, 1997; The Year of the Rat, chapbook, Grimes Press, 2000; Rock Ghost, Willow, Deer, AIROS Book-of-the-Month, University of Nebraska Press, 2004; Off-Season City Pipe, Wordcraft Writer of the Year for Poetry, Coffee House Press, 2005; Blood Run, Wordcraft Writer of the Year for Poetry, Salt Publications, UK 2006-US 2007; To Topos Ahani: Indigenous American Poetry, Journal Issue of the Year Award (ed.), Oregon State University, 2007; and Effigies, (ed.), Salt Publications, 2009. She has edited five other volumes. Her long poem "The Year of the Rat" is currently being made into a ballet through collaboration with Brent Michael Davids, composer. Recent literary publications include Connecticut Review, Prometeo Memories, Akashic Books, and Black Renaissance Noire. Recent photography publications include Connecticut Review, Future Earth Magazine and Digital Poetics. She has also authored a full-length play Icicles, numerous monologues, and has worked in theater, television, and film. Hedge Coke has been awarded several state and regional artistic and literary grants, fellowships, and tours; multiple excellence in teaching awards, including the King Chavez Parks Award; a Sioux Falls Mayor's Award for Literary Excellence; a National Mentor of the Year, a Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers and Storytellers Award; has served on several state, community, and national boards in the arts, a housing board, as a Delegate, in the United Nations Women in Peacemaking Conference, Joan B. Kroc Center for Peace and Justice, University of San Diego, and as a United Nations Presenting Speaker (with James Thomas Stevens, Mohawk Poet), Facilitator, and Speaker Nominator for the only Indigenous Literature Panel of the Indigenous Peoples Human Rights Forum. For many years she has worked with incarcerated and underserved Indigenous youth and youth of color mentorship programs and served as a court official in Indian youth advocacy and CASA. Hedge Coke is editing the Platte Valley Review and two book series of emerging Indigenous writing (Salt Publishing and Red Hen Press). She is of Huron, Cherokee, French Canadian, and Portuguese descent and came of age working fields, waters, and working in factories.

*April 30 – May 2, 2010. Invitational Field Symposium, “DRAGONFLY EYES: Multiple Ways to Envision the Future.” H. J. Andrews Experimental Forest in the Oregon Cascades. The symposium will bring together distinguished writers, architects, artists, humanities scholars, land managers, social scientists and ecologists to find ways to bring literary, artistic, and moral imagination together with the best empirical science to more fully imagine future scenarios of landscape change. The Spring Creek Project for Ideas, Nature, and the Written Word, the Andrews Experimental Forest Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) Program, and the U.S. Forest Service. You can find more information about the Spring Creek Project and the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest on the websites:http://springcreek.oregonstate.edu/ and http://www.fsl.orst.edu/lter/
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Professor Hedge Coke will also be reading at the Nebraska Book Festival on Saturday, 14 November, from 3:15-3:45 in the Auditorium of the Nebraska State Historical Museum, 15th and P Streets, Lincoln.

Reading sponsored by Native American Studies, the Department of English, and the Place Conscious Literature Group, UNL

*November 13th, 2009, University of Nebraska at Lincoln.

BAILEY LIBRARY, 227 ANDREWS
RECEPTION AND BOOK SIGNING TO FOLLOW

Allison A. Hedge Coke is a noted poet and nature writer whose books include Dog Road Woman (1997), Off-Season City Pipe (2005), Blood Run (2007), the memoir Rock, Ghost, Willow, Deer (2004), and Effigies: An Anthology of New Indigenous Writing, Pacific Rim (2009). Her work is strongly influenced by her Cherokee and Huron heritage, and reflects her lifelong love and observation of the physical, animal, and plant worlds around us.
Visit/Reading. Dr. Fran Kaye, Organizer.

Sandhill Cranes Photo by A. A. Hedge Coke
Reynolds Series March 2008 Included the Honoring the Sandhill Crane Tribute Retreat. Hosted: Wang Ping author of numerous award winning books, includingthe Last Communist Virgin, LeAnne Howe, author of Evidence of Red, Shell Shaker, and Mikko Kings, exemplary poet Hugo Jamioy Juagibioy, oraliterature weaver Aty Janay, the prolific poet James Thomas Stevens who most recently authoredA Bridge Dead in Water and Janet McAdams Island of Lost Luggage and Feral. Ramon Palomares, Fredy Chicangana, and Jack Collom were unable to come at this time. March 7-14th during the 40 to 60,000,000 year annual apex of the Sandhill Crane migration to the Kearney, Nebraska area, where 600,000 cranes are expected to arrive in this season, these poets and writers came to retreat here with the migration and performed numerous presentations for UNK and the general public.

These poems bear witness to a difficult age, an age built on a spiral of earthliness. They make an honoring song for the earth. This honoring song carries joy, sadness, fury and grief. We need this gift, these poems.
Joy Harjo, Mvksoke poet and musician

“Blood Run” the name of an ancient site in an eastern corner of the US state South Dakota. Hundreds of mounds were built here by Native American Plains peoples and cultures, a thousand years before the arrival of the white intruders (e.g., settlers, military). The poems revive the history of the sites at “Blood Run” giving profound voice to humans, animals, plants and structures, also with political-ecological hope for the future to preserve ancient spiritual places.
Bernhard Widder

Purity in Poetry! Allison Hedge Coke has captured the true essence of the way of life, celebration of life enjoyed by all the many nations of Indigenous people(s) living here on our Makoce (land) which all indigenous nations call in unison Mother Earth. All Our Relations (Mitakuye Oyasin) is eloquently spoken and expressed by Allison. It is a true honor to have a kola (friend) a true Indigenous winyan (lady), to hold, keep and express the true spirit of all nations. I AM HONORED.
Irwin Sharp Fish, Sr.2003-04 NIEA Teacher of the YearOn Off-Season City Pipe:

2008 Indigenous Poets & Writers Retreat, Soul Mountain Retreat, co-hosting with LeAnne Howe. Courtesy of the phenomenal poet and human being, Marilyn Nelson and her working group: Rhonda Ward and Giddeon, LeAnne Howe, Lara Mann, Santee Frazier, and I are all taking in the beauty of Old Lyme Connecticut here where dozens of turtles rise up and down the pond waters, split by skeins of Canadian Geese, alongside lush banks huddled over by an always eager marmot and several early robins. The air is ripe with poetry, writing, and much needed rest and community support. Santee has proven his worth as a chef as well as poet. LeAnne is providing great insight, intelligence, and terrific comic relief. Lara is ever-present with her Sedaris in-hand for belly laughs to carry her through the rigorous poetry drive she has committed to. We read in Central Gallery in Old Saybrook with Rhonda on Saturday. LeAnne's blog http://mikokings.wordpress.com/ has a photo and updates.

With what is happening in the world, with the weather turned on its head, people in turmoil and the over drawn-out campaign primary madness, this break is welcome welcome.

AWP Saturday February 14
Waldorf, 3rd Floor S167
Brain Power: Processing the Beautiful and the Horrendous. (Allison Hedge Coke, Peggy Shumaker, Linda Hogan, & Mira Bartok) Brain injury presents uniquely significant challenges to creative process, yet affords uniquely stimulating conceptualized possibility in a simultaneous manner. Each of the panelists included on this panel have cajoled memoir and life-story from revelations made apparent through their climb up and down the noodled rungs of brain trauma or neurological dilemma. We will consider the work presenting panelists and of Maxine Kumin and Floyd Skloot who support this panel.